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Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Grammar and vocab etc. are fine because they are almost pure memorization, but spoken language-wise, my worst enemy is any language with weird sounds that I cannot for the life of me produce correctly.

Don't expect me to learn to speak, for example, Xhosa, because those click sounds make me go crazy.

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Why can't people juz choose to speak japanese instead than english??? English has sooooooooo many vocab,grammar,punctuation and tenses!!! O^O

Try to learn portuguese honey. If you can't deal with English, then you'd be tottaly screwed with portuguese, or italian, or spanish and french (they're all pretty much the same-except for italian, it is slightly harder, I think)

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Well, I studied Japanese and I thought this was really funny because it actually came very easy to me. Of course, if you knew me in real life, if I told you Japanese was easy, you would think I am ridiculous as this website saying its too hard.

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Originally Posted by LavaBug

You should try german then :P

I have a few friends with Japanese as their native language and they have told me time and time again how much harder English is than Japanese (fluent speakers of both languages), so i find some of the stuff on that website to be false. If you really put time and effort into learning the language, you will speak it fluently! ^.~ just have to work!
My friend Liam is taking AP German at his school and he says how difficult it is xD but he's getting a lot better over only the course of a year.c:

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Originally Posted by PhantomPhD

i find some of the stuff on that website to be false

Just in case you didn't know, that webpage was obviously written facetiously/satirically.
Japanese only looks difficult because of its writing system, but grammar-wise, it's extremely regular and easy~

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Originally Posted by animeyay

Just in case you didn't know, that webpage was obviously written facetiously/satirically.
Japanese only looks difficult because of its writing system, but grammar-wise, it's extremely regular and easy~

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Originally Posted by animeyay

Just in case you didn't know, that webpage was obviously written facetiously/satirically.
Japanese only looks difficult because of its writing system, but grammar-wise, it's extremely regular and easy~

Oh ,_, i have such troubles with determining sarcasm and satirical manners. I apologize.

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

The "german being harder than english" thing was a response to yuki okashi based on what I heard from japanese and other foreign students/people I met, sorry if perhaps that wasn't clear.
I always found english to be rather easy, or at least I never had problems learning it...
Can't really compare it to me learning japanese though, as that came much later in my life.

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

I learned Japanese in conjunction with getting a bachelor's degree in Linguistics...so in my opinion, my easy experience with the language may be due to a slightly unfair advantage. Once you learn what makes a language into "a language", it becomes rather easy to pick apart any language given the right resources.

That, and I studied 5 years of Latin (which has now nearly fallen all out of my head...I'm getting old) which I found to be much harder because of all of the declensions and cases. The Spanish I took the first time my schools had any languages available, I found easier to learn than both Japanese and Latin.

Though, my speaking for Japanese isn't great...but that more has to do with the fact that I have rather severe social anxiety. Reading and writing will always be easier for me in any language!

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

I took a summer crash course in Mandarin when I was 20. The tones were really a pain in the donkey to me. But grammatically, it is very easy to learn since it is more like the English structure. While with Japanese, it is kind of upside down here and there. Some Chinese classes teach the simplistic form of the characters while some teach the traditional. When I took Chinese, I already had 5 years of Japanese and Japanese use the traditional form of the characters so I was more used to that.

Some Chinese classes teach the simplistic form of the characters while some teach the traditional. When I took Chinese, I already had 5 years of Japanese and Japanese use the traditional form of the characters so I was more used to that.

Japanese is sandwiched in the middle between traditional and simplified though, because it had its own round of character simplification. It's not as drastically simplified as simplified Chinese, but still a lot of characters were simplified.

In this sentence: Do you like sketching/drawing?
Simplified Chinese: 你喜欢绘画吗？
Traditional Chinese: 你喜歡繪畫嗎？

你 and 吗/嗎 are not used in Japanese at all.
喜 is the same across all three.
欢/歡 is written as 歓 in Japanese.
绘/繪 is only simplified half-way in Japanese: 絵.
Japanese has simplified 畫 into 画, same as simplified Chinese.

Re: So you want to learn Japanese

Generally, words derived from Chinese will have similar pronunciation and meaning. It's a shame Korean has virtually abandoned the use of Chinese characters (hanja); it would make Korean a lot easier for Chinese and Japanese speakers to pick up though :P